OSM-Gravatar, Changeset changes & Way-Tags @ HDYC

by Pascal Neis - Published: November 18th, 2012

After my latest updates to the “How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?” website, some users asked me if I could add the new OSM gravatar to it. Starting today, you can find your OSM-gravatar from your OSM user website on HDYC too. If your HDYC-profile doesn’t show a gravatar yet, please be patient. It will be automatically updated as soon as you make any type of OSM edit to the OSM database. The following figure contains all updates that were made to the website marked with a circle. As always, Harry is our example 😉

As a second update, I added the number of changes that were made in a user’s changeset and grouped them into three classes. This way the website shows if a user only makes a lot of changesets with 15 or less edits, more than 150 edits or something in between. Last but not least, you can find some additional information about the number of ways of which the user is the last modifier, including its way tag. This provides some information about the data collection tendency of the contributor, for instance if the user only creates a lot of buildings or large landuse areas.

13 Responses to “OSM-Gravatar, Changeset changes & Way-Tags @ HDYC”

Hi Pascal, the new informations are interesting & I like the idea of being able to determine what preferences the contributor has. But I wouldn’t write “…only creates …” or “…only makes changesets with…” since what type of information is collected is influenced a lot by the area one is mapping in. In my case most of the highways at the places I live have already been mapped – just the buildings were missing and landuse areas were mapped as large areas instead of separate ones. Plus: I would call all the additional information valuable – after the streets have been mapped. Still: Good work!

Another topic: Why is deleting less nodes better in the OSMFight? When nodes are redundant they should be deleted or merged. Deleting is just the easier way and sometimes there is nothing to merge them with.

Hi Matthias, thank you for your comment. Regarding your OSMFight question. You are right, but sometimes an user delete a lot of nodes and create new ones, instead to use the old ones. Anyway, it is just a game 😉 Maybe I will add some further rounds 🙂

Hi Gavin,
thank you very much for your comment. Sadly it is not possible to get this information through the OSM API, or do you know any solution? At the OSM user page you will only find the overall information about traces too 🙁

This continues to be brilliant — together with all of your other brilliant tools!

One question/request: Would it be possible to also have the Activity Center that is an option in OOOC also in HDYC profile? That would be a very welcome addition as it would give a quick and easy idea of where (perhaps) the person has edited most (… unless they’re so all over the place that it would fall in the middle of an ocean/desert/etc).

BTW. If you’re running this on WordPress (at it seems to me you are) how about adding a plugin that would allow people to subscribe by email to the comments of a post (such as Subscribe-to-Comments, http://j.mp/wp-emailcomments)?

Great!
Just as a suggestion:
It Would be really neat to have something like a “forum stats banner/signature” from this. (e.g. for signature on forum.openstreetmap.org)

So either directly from your website or your website providing the output data optionally in some kind “more static” xml format, so it can be processed by an (external) generator without the need to be adapted at layout changes of your page.